Markov Chain

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It may be surprising, but at the core of thousands of chatbots like Megabot and Cleverbot is a simple mathematical construction implemented in about 30 - 50 lines of code called a Markov Chain. This construction was developed over a hundred years ago by a Russian mathematician, Andrey Markov. Dr. Markov posited a finite state machine, in which one input lead to a series of outputs, and one was chosen by probability. The chain would not remember previous actions in the chain, but just note that this node is most likely associated with that one, and hop to that node to repeat the process. If it searches four nodes deep for probability, it can, given a graph of commonly used words from an existing corpus of text, write text almost indistinguishable from the kind that would be written by the original human author. Markov chains could also be used for math equations, chess games (associating moves), or even programming code (this line of code is probably followed by this one, so write that line in next). Given a broad list of sentences commonly said by human chat-attenders, a Markov chain can actually pass a Turing test. Key word being "can", not "will." On the downside of this, due to the stateless nature of the chain, the bot lacks any understanding of either the stimulus or the response. It lacks an understanding of grammar, and often posits totally nonsensical, or even ungrammatical, sentences. Fed enough scientific papers, it might write a sentence like "It is established that." This phrase might appear in the original work, but the bot fails to recognize that this is not an entire sentence. I might use a Markov chain to help with creativity. It would randomly combine ideas, which could lead to some creative conclusions. As an example, Usenet's Mark V. Shaney was actually a Markov Chain bot. People thought it was a very confused man, possibly on drugs, and possibly insane, but it was a computer program. The most famous utterance that this bot produced was "I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt." The bot had started with a common opening statement for posts on the particular discussion group, "I spent an interesting evening recently," which they used to describe dating experiences, with part of the expression to "Take it with a grain of salt," meaning that the previous statement should be viewed via non-literal means, and with little claims to any veracity or truth. The two collide to produce the hilarious impression of a man obsessively staring at a tiny speck of salt, so infinitesimal, and yet so orderly, in some sort of weird quasi-science ritual. And that's the wonderful thing about Markov Chains -- you'll mostly get nonsensical crap, but hilarious things will pop up all the time.

UFOs

You know where I think the ideas of UFOs came from? I think there was an experimental aircraft crash in 1947, the government got all weird and evasive about it, like they do for anything classified, rightly or wrongly, some guy happened to write a book about people being abducted by aliens that year, and the two ideas got combined in a massive hurricane of terrified and crazy. Tune in tomorrow when I continue with the downright strange things of this world.

Mnenomics

What order do you do operations in, in math, when you've got a lot of them? Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally. er, I mean, Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. See how the first memorable phrase starts with the first letters of the words in the second?
Mnemonics are a psychological trick where you remember something by associating it with something novel, which your brain expects to do. The more associations (and the stranger), the better you can remember it. They're named after Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory (and apparently, arbitrary spelling. Pronounced "Nem-o-seen.")
Okay, so what kind of stars exist? Oh be a fine girl, kiss me. Ouch. Hey, I'm not literally hitting on you, it's the mnemonic. Lists their orders from hottest to coldest. Our sun's a G. Specifically, G2V, a little cooler than the average G, main sequence.
Okay, music. Those lines stand for notes, but which ones? Well, in the treble clef, "every good boy does fine." In the base clef, "Grizzly bears don't fly airplanes." Oh, and sharps appear in a particular order too: "Father Charles goes down and ends battles." (Flats are in the opposite order, if you'd care to write a mnemonic for that.)
In chemistry, equations always obey OIL-RIG. That is, oxidation is loss (of electrons), reduction is gain. Redox!
Mechanics. Which way do I turn the screw again? Righty tighty. So therefore, lefty loosy.
Electronics? They're color coded: "Bright Boys Rave Over Young Girls But Veto Getting Wed."
Biology? All life is elaborately classified. "Kings Play Chess On Fine Grained Sand." (Although the last two, Genus and Species, are unique enough to identify pretty much anything in existence.)
And if this isn't circular enough, remember this poem and all your circles will be correct:

Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
In mystic force, and magic spelling
Celestial sprites elucidate
All my own striving can't relate
Or locate they who can cogitate
And so finally terminate.
Finis.

(Which, if you count the letters in each word, becomes Pi, to 31 digits, which is accurate enough for any dimensions of a circle the size of the universe, accurate to the width of a hydrogen atom. Trying to be more accurate than that in engineering is just being pedantic.)
Why do mnemonics work? Well, our brains are designed to keep novel and well connected information. any of these facts by themselves would just be discarded, but this gives a startling and well connected way of remembering, and any one component can bring the entire chain to mind. Also, because of a quirk of psychology, a dirty one works way better than a clean one.

Paranoia will Destroy Ya

Talking to paranoid people seems really trippy. They're totally detached from reality, it seems like. They believe in utterly insane things like massive conspiracies dedicated to ruining their morning coffee, or some other result completely short of the millions and millions of dollars it would have taken to do everything they describe. Pointing this out does not deter them in the slightest -- obviously their enemies are both unreasonably wealthy and impossibly petty.
Surprisingly, one psychology book I read claimed these beliefs all stem from one erroneous belief, which proceeds to compound everything else. That belief? I am never wrong. And with that in place, suddenly all the craziness makes total sense. How? Think about how often the average person is thwarted, frustrated, annoyed, or defeated. It's quite often. Now imagine having to blame all of that on things other than yourself. Let's go through a common day.
You wake up, only to notice that the alarm you set last night was not on, and now you're late to school or work. You quickly rush to avoid being even later...and are stuck in traffic. People cut you off repeatedly, and one guy flips you off. "Nice." At your laboring place, your supervisor is enraged at your lateness and incompetence, and chews you out quite a lot. It's a rough day, and coming back home you again have to suffer in traffic. At home, you have misplaced the remote, and you left a cup of coffee out on the counter this morning that has now gone stale and must be thrown away. You sit to watch your favorite TV show...but it got preempted, in favor of some inane thing that you don't really care about. In irritation, you go to bed early, grumbling to yourself.
Now, if you're a sane person, you blamed the alarm on forgetting to set it last night, the traffic to the fact that you're rushing and probably driving a little rudely (plus there being a lot of people, some of who are jerks), your boss's anger at you is genuine rage, but out of proportion to the true level of your faults, the news at home is more important to many people than what you wanted to watch which is why the tv station preempted your show, the remote and the coffee were lapses of your memory that annoy you, but can nonetheless be worked around. In short, you mostly blamed yourself for what went wrong. You assure yourself that you will try harder tomorrow, and it will be less bad for you.
Now let's try it again, only this time, you are never wrong. Your alarm didn't go off. Clearly it's the evil conspiracy trying to prevent you from succeeding! They must have secretly turned it off during the night. The fiends! The traffic? Another evil plot!!!! Especially that one guy who flipped you off. Your supervisor is mad that you came in late and are now bungling yet another project? No, he's clearly in on it! You come home and your remote has been stolen!! And they hid your coffee until it went bad! They will clearly stop at nothing to irritate the living shit out of you! You sit down to enjoy a little TV, but the conspiracy people clearly saw this coming, and had your show preempted. Clearly they will stop at nothing!!! As you go to bed in irritation, you resolve that tomorrow you will get the upper hand for a change. After all, for all their evil plotting, you were not truly beaten.
The paranoid outlook is more satisfying, even if it does lead to being afraid of your own shadow and believing that your least favorite type of music is a secret plot to annoy you. After all, you're never wrong.
I think a lot of these psychological conditions are actually spectrum. One can be a little paranoid, and very into conspiracy theories, hard headed, and fearful, or very paranoid and blame the Martian space monkeys for your missing car keys. Or any amount in between.

Common Dreams

A study by a Hong Kong area psychologist found out that you, and I, and random people in Hong Kong, often have extremely similar dreams. There are some dreams that pretty much everyone on earth has, which is kind of strange because of the variety of cultures and lifestyles out there. I'll tell you some of mine, and the study shows that you almost certainly had them too.
As a young child, I often dreamed that I was driving a car with some other children. Sometimes the incongruity of this never hit me at the time, other times I had a nagging suspicion that maybe children shouldn't be driving cars, and maybe I'd get in trouble for it. Those stopped when I learned to actually drive. I also used to dream about having a fist fight with a person who couldn't be damaged. They could hurt me, though, and thankfully those stopped in college.
I used to dream about being naked in public, and boy was it embarrassing. In the more recent ones, however, I always seem to come to the realization that no one cares (at least in the dream), and so I don't have to be embarrassed. Perhaps my subconscious thinks that what I'm most embarrassed about really is no big deal to everyone else? And about two weeks ago, I had for the first time in my life that old chestnut of dreamers, falling out teeth.
In my senior year at college, I would have dreams in which a professor ruled me to be "stupid," and thus required me to repeat high school, or worse, junior high school. And I would feel humiliated...but the kids there only made fun of me for being "old," which really didn't bother me at all. Even though I'm easily now twice their age. And repeat high school was always so....easy.
Dreams common with other people, but that I generally haven't had, include being chased, searching for a specific place, having to pee but there being no suitable toilets (which I've had maybe once), eating lots of delicious foods (I'm going to guess these people are dieting), and suddenly being famous.
The psychologist, Dr. Calvin Kai-Ching Yu, also said that psychotic thinking was far more common in dreams than in people's waking environment. Believing that a famous person is in love with you despite any evidence to the contrary is, in waking life, a disorder called Erotomania, which suggests we keep you away from this person before you hurt that person or yourself. But in dreams, at least half the people worldwide have that experience. Dr. Yu said that psychotic-thinking based dreams are actually the most common kind, and that draws some interesting questions. Could many mental disorders actually stem from a damaged ability to tell dreams from waking experience? (And I can't tell you how many times I've woken up convinced of something, only to realize that it couldn't possibly be true.)
The most surprising thing about this is the way that people from different cultures have almost exactly the same dreams. One would think that, say, French and American and Hong-Kong-ian people would have different dreams because their waking lives are so totally different. What those three people would chose to wear, and do, and deal with other people, and eat, and so on, are all totally different. Then they all go to bed and have a dream where their teeth fall out. That is the weirdest thing I have heard all month.

Easier Computing

Yesterday, I came across a young man ranting about how it doesn't make sense to him that Apple computer survives as a business. Their computers are quite expensive. They're quite limited. If you try to do something that Apple doesn't approve of, it'll tell you to sit down and shut up. Albeit more politely than that. Apple controls a small market share, one that hasn't grown after quite a lot of marketing.
Other people rushed in to tell him that his ideas were wrong. Apple has a distinct market, one that will gladly pay anything they charge. Apple products are quite flashy and fashionable, but most people buy them because they're easy. From the days of the first Macintosh, Apple invested a lot into psychology and marketing to find the most intuitive interface they could come up with. And it's very easy for a lot of people. Apple is primarily a hardware company, and only releases combinations of hardware known to work. This eliminates 99% of computer problems.
I think there's still ways to make it easier after that. People have proposed everything from webtop models, in which the computer is only a memory-managing OS and a web browser, and has fewer parts to fail or confuse, (A study showed we spend 99% of our time in web browsers anyway, which this model finds encouraging), to cartridge computing, in which different applications would be loaded from ROM-based cartridge(the way that old NES games were) giving a physical aspect to the computing.
Now, truthfully, I'd want a lot of psychological studies before I recommend anything. People are all different, and what's pleasing to one person is profoundly irritating to another. A webtop system is great if everything you do on a computer is on a web page somewhere. It's less great if you just want to do spreadsheets and have an unreliable internet connection. A cartridge system would drive someone who loses things frequently crazy when they inevitably lose a cartridge and now have to re-buy it. Ideas that we think are obvious in computing are often only obvious because we're familiar with them.
I'm curious about what that would discover.

News Summary

NPR says that the best way to survive in a falling elevator is not to jump at the last second, as is popularly believed, (as you could not possibly jump fast enough), but you should instead lie on the floor, and try to wedge yourself between the two walls at the last second. You'd take a beating, but you'd live. After all, it's not the fall that kills you, so much as the sudden stop at the end. Hopefully my readers will never need to know this information, but better to have and not need, then to need and not have.
Discovery News reports what female friends of mine have said to me all along: If you're female, your own body hates you with the ferocity of a thousand suns. Estogen clusters in ovulating women make it hard for them to think straight, brain scanning studies of American women showed that they want to be thinner, sometimes thinner than is biologically possible for them. Confrontation with the idea that they might be fat, even if demonstrably false, sent part of their brains into existential crisis.
There was also reported to be a crisis in groundwater, in that at the rate it is being used faster than it can be replaced (by rain, underground water flow, etc). Complete depletion would result in a massive and disastrous desertification of the area. (I do not believe their claim that this is connected to sea level rise. Groundwater has always gone towards the sea since there was a sea to begin with. Groundwater didn't come about by magic, but by rain from evaporated seawater.)
They also report that before airplanes, there were still intercontinental exchanges of disease causing viruses and bacteria, carried by duststorm. Bacteria and viruses would travel with the dust, blown by the wind, until deposited on a new land, with new hosts to infect. The disease would arrive in a weakened state, having to survive both a dry wind storm and a large amount of UV radiation, which was only partially blocked by the supply of dust.
Fark leads me to a story by ABC news, which says that a mall in St. Louis, Missouri, banned groups of unaccompanied teenagers, to the immense annoyance of said teenagers. The mall also discovered that said teenagers were not their primary patrons: the policy made all store's profits go up, even the ones catering to teenagers. The large groups hanging out tended not to spend money, preferring instead to horse around and irritate others around them.
Tomorrow I return to the mad science.

Psychology Metric

Remember long ago when I jokingly reported that people should try to take jobs based on what kind of character they would be, if they were in dungeons and dragons? I think I want to develop a more serious version of that.
Identify personal traits and characteristics that would allow prospective employers to match candidates to ideal jobs with a simple pen or pencil test. No more will we have programmers unable to program, people bitterly angry with their horribly mismatched jobs, or glass ceilings from being limited to doing what you did in the past. (What, people never change, ever?)
I'm not making this test. I don't know nearly enough about psychology to compose the test, nor the interdisciplinary studies to know what kind of person does well where. (Would an investment banker make a good, say, salesman, or lawyer?)
And if you'd like me to do more D&D, yeah, I suppose I could do that too.

Counterfactual belief

One morning, I successfully convinced myself that I did not exist. To be fair, it was early morning, I was tired, and I didn't want to get up. So I thought, "Oh, don't worry, you don't have to get up, because you don't really exist." In my tired state, this seemed perfectly reasonable for about five minutes. (After a short snooze, I did remember that ignoring reality doesn't make it go away, and I had to get up anyway.)
An earlier morning, I forgot that movement was possible. The alarm went off, and all I could think about it was "That noise is so annoying." It took me ten minutes to remember that I could reach over and turn it off, and another 30 seconds to remember that I had set it deliberately, because I had to get up at that time.
We, as people, like to think that we're reasonable and rational all the time, but sometimes we're clearly not. Psychologists point to a long list of cognitive biases discovered over the years. We're self-serving, seeing ourselves as better than can be warranted by the facts, we're prone to believing in consistency, ignoring all evidence that we've changed over the years, and we hate to admit it when we don't know something, preferring to just make something up and claim it to be true. A psychology student made an entertaining song describing many of the cognitive biases discovered over the years.
On top of this, we experience altered-states in which our thinking is way different than normal. Sleep and tiredness, as we began with. Drinking. Meditation. And we need to sleep, or our brain deteriorates and we die.
Often, altered states leads people to accept strange ideas, and then the various cognitive biases prevent them from ever rejecting these ideas again. Like UFO-abduction belief. There are many altered states in which other people seem distorted, most notably temporal lobe epilepsy. People experiencing temporal lobe epilepsy often experience profound religious experiences, or, if not particularly religious, perceive people around them to be aliens. Having recovered, self-consistency bias (with a slight touch of self-serving) leads them to conclude that they really were abducted by aliens and that anyone who says otherwise is a filthy liar. (Or that they really did speak with God, and what he really wants is for them to open a taco stand or whatever. And again, anyone who claims otherwise is Satan's puppet.)
I'm not sure what to do about this, but even knowing that it exists and is possible is a big defense. Just because you hear weird noises in your house at night, it doesn't make it haunted. Your vivid experience in which you teleported to Mars and learned the true nature of the universe may have just been a totally kickass dream. (Though, even if it didn't happen, that may make an entertaining novel for you to write.) I probably have some false beliefs, but I don't readily know what they are.

Moral Strength

Psychology Central, and many other publications, are reporting today that one way to make yourself at least temporarily stronger is to be extremely moral.
Participants who first either did or imagined something extremely good, like volunteering at a soup kitchen, were able to lift heavier weights, and keep them up for a longer period of time.
Equally curious was the fact that people who imagined themselves doing extremely evil things, (like setting a puppy on fire) also gained this same boost in strength and stamina.
Not sure what to make of this.

Economic Spite

Economists talk about the world as if it were made of perfectly rational people, who all wanted to get the best outcome for themselves, and in doing so made the best possible outcome for other people too. Which would be nice, but falls short of real human psychology, which has other, less rational needs.
The more I study economics, and the psychology involved, the more I realize that spite plays an unfortunately large role in monetary affairs. Yes, we like having money, but we often like denying it to someone else more. Even if this denial impoverishes us, we, like captain Ahab, insist that from hell's heart, our enemy be good and stabbed, and damn the consequences!
As an example of this, an economist, Max Bazerman, runs an experiment in which participants bid on a $20 bill, with six rules, most notably that the 1st and 2nd highest bids are given to him, and he gives the bill to the 1st highest bid. Now, rationally, bidding at all isn't necessarily a good idea, because you could lose, and it's definitely moronic to bid more than $10 or so, because your bid eats up your winnings pretty fast. Mr. Bazerman reports that he nearly always makes a profit, often as high as $100. This is irrational...but people keep up the bidding, just to not lose.
Why? Spite. The other person is willing to give several times the prize just to punish their rival for the money. And both are poorer for it. Mr. Bazerman is laughing all the way to the bank.
I see this in other fields too. Much of politics is about spite. People furiously upset about welfare don't blink an eye at other wasteful spending that costs hundreds of times as much. It's not the loss of public funds that's upsetting them. It's that "those people" (read: the poor) that they feel superior to are getting money. Same with a lot of international rivalries -- nations are willing to impoverish themselves to defeat another they consider an enemy, when it would be far more rational, or even sane, to cooperate.
America in particular has a history of spite problems. There were spite houses that people built for that one relative that they hated to live in, and was deliberately made uncomfortable as a subtle dig at the hospitality they felt compelled to provide. There were spite fences that neighbors built too tall just to annoy each other until cities passed laws forbidding malicious construction. There have been years of "identity politics" in which people demand better protection for their group so they can mistreat others. (Especially racially and religiously. Ugh.)
Spite makes the world a worse place to be. People suffer when wrath is poured upon them, sometimes just for existing, and communal values are damaged. Sometimes even the malicious person damages themself in the process, as the old American proverb goes, "Cutting off your nose to spite your face." It makes no sense, and we should stop it at all cost.

Failure of the Soda Tax

Slate has an interesting article about why a plan to reduce the dangers of excess soda consumption with a tax will be a miserable failure: Because Americans tend to be defiant trolls who resist any claims made by an authority, just for the sake of resisting.
The article begins by pointing out previous cases of pointless defiance. In Miami, a law to discourage phosphorus use in detergents, on the grounds that it encourages harmful algae blooms, was resisted by consumers who wildly stocked up on phosphorous based detergents, even resorting to the black market to do so. These detergents did not cost any less, and did not clean any better, but the thought of giving the government the finger proved irresistable.
Or a later study in which people were left in a room that had a marker and a sign urging them "Do not write on the wall." Huge numbers of people who would not have normally written on the wall now did so, often defiantly daring the authorities to punish them for it. Some people even stole the sign, not because it had any monitary value, but as another contemptuous gesture towards those in charge.
Apparently part of the reason is related to choice. Americans, and possibly other people too, resent having an option removed from them. Any removal of an option sets off immediate thoughts of tyranny, and poking fingers in the eyes of authority for the sheer sake of annoying them.
The article does point out that people are less likely to defy things presented in a different, choice granting, right, like the light of education. Taxing soda to discourage people from drinking it brings out the rebellion. Taxing soda to pay for an inititative to pay for education, which will teach that drinking soda is bad, results in a compliant shrug. People might drink slightly less soda, and don't get upset about paying more because, hey, when was more education ever a bad thing? You still have the choice to drink the soda, it's not positioned as something you "can't" do.
Maybe politicians need to pay more attention to this. Sometimes even having a justification makes an order go down easier. If cameras are forbidden just because, expect tantrums. If cameras are forbidden because the flash would damage the equipment, people keep their camera stowed.

Snails on Meth

Dr. Grumpy, a very interesting neurologist, brings up a tale he found in The Journal of Experimental Biology, in which snails improved their memory by getting whacked out on amphetamines. Wait, what?
Apparently, snails can breathe in two ways. One, in high oxygen environments like air, they can absorb enough oxygen through their skin. Should they have to crawl through a low-oxygen pond, they can also extend breathing tubes to the surface, like a snorkel. This principle was used to get the snails to crawl through a meth-pond, getting the snail totally high. Probably to verify effects in human users of such drugs.
Human users of meth experience distortions of memory, remembering more strongly traumatic things that happened during drug binges, and tend to follow habits obsessively. The scientists were curious as to if this were cultural or biological, and so tried to test it on snails, which have no culture.
Snails in deoxygenated ponds tend to bring up a breathing tube. However, it can "hold its breath" if this proves unwieldy. So they had snails crawl through ponds, and poked the snail in a way that annoyed it every time the snail tried to open a breathing tube. Some of the ponds were just low oxygen, but others were full of meth.
Sure enough, snails that crawled through ordinary ponds didn't remember the previous ones, and got poked. Snails that crawled through meth ponds tended to remember the previous pond, and held their breath.
This may be yet another reason why amphetamines are addictive drugs -- they reinforce existing obsessive-compulsive behaviors, one of which is obtaining and using amphetamines.

Fear

We're afraid of a lot of stuff these days. We're afraid that our children will act like morons. We're afraid that natural disasters will kill us. We're afraid of being poisoned or harmed by chemicals, injured by our fellow people in both organized ways (like governments) and unorganized (crime).
Our animal ancestors developed fear to urge them towards self preservation. When predators attacked, those that did not escape would die to be eaten. Natural hazards like falling or sharp rocks would also end lives in a rather fast fashion as well. Animals might not comprehend that they will die, but they know scary when they see it.
Unfortunately, as we humans are intelligent, we are also imaginative, and this turns against us. We can conceive of scary situations that have yet to happen, and can plan ahead to avoid negative outcomes. Normally a good thing -- until it runs away on you and you endlessly worry about things that probably won't happen.
Fear is also used politically in the form of terrorism. Scare people enough and you can get them to agree to things just to make it stop. The current military doctrine of the United States is "Shock and Awe," combining the previous Superior Firepower doctrine with mobility to produce armies that rapidly dominate everything around them, terrifying all opposition into running away, or at least quitting the fight. Fear, representing the desire not to die in the face of a dangerous situation, is turned into yet another weapon.
Fear can be pathological. People who are traumatized by situations can develop phobias, in which they are cripplingly afraid of things that imperiled them in the past. A person with a spider-phobia (Arachnophobia) will recoil in horror from even harmless spiders. They will avoid places where they believe even might have spiders, which can easily branch into new phobias. (Arachnophobia leading to a fear of enclosed places, as they may contain spiders.) Psychological help may be required.
Fear has economic consequences too. Depressions worsen as everyone involved attempts to avoid negative consequences, and the economy slows further from lack of spending. A negative cycle develops for quite a while until necessity eventually ends it. In the past, this has generally been a war. Governments must spend bucket-loads of money to win a war, and enough people can receive this spending to begin to buy their favorite goods again, and the depression ends.
Is there a better remedy for fear than psychological counseling?

Addiction

I think that the word "addiction" is overused these days. Typically, it's thrown around over any sort of unnecessary dependency. A person who cannot stop injecting themselves with heroin, for instance, is addicted. I hear people talk about being addicted to such things as TV, running, Farmville, chocolate, or sex. I think that's insane. Yes, you're psychologically habituated, and you'd feel bad if I took those things away from you. I doubt you'd go into convulsions and require medical intervention, the way an alcohol or heroin addict would.
Now while these lesser, psychological addictions, are bad if they interfere with your life, work, or relationships, I doubt I need to keep you in a bathtub with a drip IV and monitor you constantly in case you try to sneak some TV in a flask.
I think balance is the issue. Enjoying a TV show is okay. Watching 16 hours of TV per day suggests that maybe you should cut back a little bit. Especially if you get fired because you wouldn't stop watching from a portable TV you insisted on bringing to your cubical.

Are animals intelligent?

As a high school literature assignment, I was put on a team and asked to write a group paper about the intelligence of animals. We had to have an argument that they were, but also an argument that they were not. The other three members of the team strongly wanted to argue that they were, leaving me to write the argument that they were not. I mostly accomplished this by discussing some of the least intelligent animals, the ones that barely have a nervous system. But now that I've graduated, I'd like to discuss the topic in more detail. (The paper, like most of my other academic works, has largely been lost to the ages.)
First, I'm going to have to define terms. Humans are animals, and at least some are intelligent, but usually when this question is asked, it is referring to non-human animals, so I will work with this restriction. Intelligence is also poorly defined when this comes up. Let us define intelligence as the ability to comprehend abstractions, and adapt behavior to better prosper in the environment. This is slightly different from "the ability to score high on an IQ test," but there's enough overlap for our purposes.
Animals have a deep range of intelligence levels. On the lowest rungs are largely invertebrate animals that barely have a nervous system, and react to their environment primarily with a very limited number of pre-programmed instincts. Jellyfish and lobsters are good examples of this. For all their otherwise complexity, lobsters have about 4 responses to any stimulus. Hide from it, eat it, pee on it, and during the mating season, hurl gametes at it. Lobsters exposed to each other usually pick the "eat it" option, and are cannibalistic, much to the frustration of would-be lobster farmers. This is why lobsters in tanks have restraints (like rubber bands) put on their claws.
On the high end are some forest animals, often in the psittacine or primate families, who develop extremely complex, even cultural, behavior. They must learn from others in their social group, around an ever shifting environment, if they want to survive. They also need to fit cooperative social roles, as a lone parrot or ape is a dead parrot or ape. They are born helpless, and require rearing by parents, unlike the lobsters or jellyfish who are born self-sufficient. The record holders in this regard would be African Greys for the parrot group, and Chimpanzees and Bonobos in the apes, with strong progress shown by Gorillas. All four species have a noted habit of tool use, attempts at communication, complex social behavior, and very strangely enough, all are native to Africa.
I should also put in a bit about Dolphins. Dolphins have a complex society, and show many signs of intelligence. They have no tool-using ability due to their limb configuration, and live in a very different environment than us humans, which does frustrate communication attempts. Nonetheless, complex ideas have been conveyed to them and sometimes even understood.
Now, limitations. When testing the intelligence of animals, one must be on guard against cueing. Most of these animals are social animals that take cues from each other. When one finds food, it indicates to the others so that they can all share it, for instance. In the 1800s, there was a horse, "clever Hans," said to know mathematics. Later testing revealed the horse was actually taking cues from its owner, and didn't really understand mathematics at all. (It would indicate numbers by stomping its hoof, and later testing showed that Hans would just stomp his hoof until his owner nodded in agreement.) Similarly, a lot of parrots learn by imitation, as their social behavior does often involve mimicking each other's noises. Parrots will say a lot of words that they are unaware have any meaning, and owners of pet parrots often report that theirs will copy noises from the television, the telephone, ambient video games, the doorbell, and so on. Why? Because it's there. A parrot that has learned to say "Hello" or "I love you" may only think of this as a "human noise" to be imitated in the presence of humans. Similarly, the "signing apes" that have been taught sign language do spend quite a lot of time ignoring questions posed by their handlers in favor of pestering them for toys and candy, which speaks badly about their understanding of the language they're using.
Psychologists report on communication and language that some signs of intelligence in language use are re-combining words in novel contexts not spoken to them, "kenning" new ideas from old ones (such as Alex's description of an apple as a "banerry," from his known fruits of "Banana" and "cherry"), lying (which shows that one understands that other people do not have the same ideas that you do, an idea that human children do not understand until they are 2 or 3), and context appropriate grammar (respond to a "you" question with "I", instead of repeating "you.") Alex and his immediate successor Griffin may show these signs, but the average pet African Grey does not.
And after saying all of these facts, even the smartest non-human animal is rather dumb compared with an average human. Alex lived to be age 31, but his most advanced skill was one achieved by human child at about age 12, the ability to identify material composition. ("What matter, alex?") He was on average as intelligent as a 6 year old child, which in an IQ test would give him an IQ of 20. For comparison, IQ tests are weighted so that the human average is 100, and the standard deviation is 15 points, putting Alex, an exceptional parrot, as our most stupid of human beings, the ones barely able to talk and needing caretakers to change diapers and wipe away the drool. (An IQ of 20 qualifies a person as "cretinous," the lowest category.) Lobsters would be lucky to make a single IQ point at all if tested.
So, why the immense difference? Humans have specialized in being intelligent over the traits that animals use. Humans are very weak for our size, slow, more easily tire, are more easily damaged or sickened, and unlike the average animal, run the risk of choking every time we swallow. An animal the same size as a human is an immense physical threat if encountered without tools or weapons. Our only physical advantage is our heat distribution, which allows us to run immense distances without having to lay down and swelter for an hour after every mile.
But even at the beginning of human techology, this proved an overwhelming advantage. Early humans would construct elaborate traps and herd animals straight into them. With curiosity came experimentation, which lead to more technology, which has only exponentially increased our power.
So are animals intelligent? Not very. Some of them are slightly intelligent. Most are stupid in ways we humans can barely imagine.

Cognitive Collison Equals Creative

According to Wired Magazine, the best thing the boss of a creative team (like advertising, programming, engineering, or so on) can do to promote their creative talents is to let them goof off on facebook or twitter for a while. Wait, what?
It seems that creative works are caused by a sort of cognitive collision, when two of your ideas ram headfirst into each other, leaving the debris of a new idea behind. People notice things, incorporate them into their existing ideas, and when two of them collide, bam, awesome new idea.
This explains why it's so much harder for me to come up with new ideas to write about now that I've graduated. College did involve going to a different environment, with shiny new ideas constantly inserted into my conciousness where they collided with existing ones. The constant need for task switching helped too. Now that it's over, thinking "Hmm, need job, find find find okay now tired watch television" all day isn't as helpful a mode.
The article warns that it's not sufficient to just goof off. A game of solitaire might help you feel better after a hard day, but it's not going to give you any new ideas. You need novel stimulation of brand new information for this to work. Even if this information is completely irrelevant to your problem.

Nonhuman Music

I have four tracks of music on my computer that were written by something that wasn't a human being. This is not a surprise to me -- birds and some other animals use music for communication and whatnot, but it has disturbed some people who believe that music is somehow uniquely human.
Two of the tracks are by an elephant orchestra in Thailand. Elephants write rather strange music by human terms, with a jarring and chaotic sound. This doesn't disturb the critics, because they can easily proclaim it not to be real music.
The other two are written by a computer program, in the style of European classical music, as was popular from 1400 - 1800. They are indistinguishable from a composition written by a person back then, and that really bothers people. because they feel that only a human being can produce music that touches their emotions like that, and if a computer can do it, maybe their feelings somehow weren't real in the first place.
The program, EMI, has undergone a lot of evolution. It was first taught to write music according to rules, but that proved too boring. So then its author, Miller McCune, reviewed how classical composers wrote, and they did often break their own rules. So randomness and rule breaking were introduced. Many small improvements later, it was writing music that could fool all the critics.
In a way, it doesn't compete with human composers, because human composers can work with many different styles, and can even chose styles, while the program is limited to one style.
Personally I have dabbled in music, but I ironically seem to be some sort of hypothetical composer, being quite able to produce interesting scores, but unable to actually perform them. Strange. I like this idea, because people love music, and this ensures that there will be a lot of it.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling one gets when one realizes that two of your beliefs contradict each other, therefore one of them must be wrong.
As an example of this, let's say that you've paid $100 into a fund, only to realize that the opportunity that you were hoping to exploit turns out to be extremely stupid, like a timeshare that you didn't really want. (Because let's say you hate traveling, it's somewhere you don't want to visit, and it's kind of small for you.) You are faced with the following beliefs:

• I am a smart person


• I paid $100 for this


• It's extremely stupid

One of these has to go. You could go reverse sour grapes and convince yourself that you actually did want the timeshare and it's not stupid in any way. You could somehow believe that you didn't actually invest the money. (It was actually for the hotel stay on your vacation, or something else.) You probably won't decide that you're actually a dumbass who shouldn't be trusted with so much as a dime, because you probably respect yourself. Thinking of yourself as a fool is both harsh and very depressing.
Lately I've been reading a lot about George Orwell, Propaganda, and particularly Mr. Orwell's writings about nationalism and totalitarianism. He points out this phenomenon in his field (literary criticism) and nation (UK, 1940) occurs practically constantly. He gave constant examples of people wildly bending facts that implied things that they didn't like. His fellow critics often saw books in political terms, currying favor when the implied politics agreed with them, and loudly denouncing any implied disagreement.
He goes on to demonstrate how you could determine if a person was a Fascist by asking them to name the title of Haile Selassie, leader of Ethiopia. Anti-fascists would translate his official title to "Emperor," Pro-fascists would leave it untranslated (and thus threateningly foreign) as "Nagus." These terminologies were required by the person's beliefs about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, specifically the justification. Pro-fascists saw it as the civilization of an uncivilized country, Anti-fascists saw it as a cynical land-grab.
This concept affects us today because more and more operations involve a psychological aspect. Wars are fought in which one side can win without firing a bullet, but instead by persuading their would be enemy not to fight. In peace time, advertising seeks to sway your behavior into buying the sponsor's products or services. Advertisers therefore have to minimize this effect, if not for honesty's sake, then for the hope of getting a repeat sale and good word of mouth.

Why Global Warming Denial is so common in America

I think I've figured out why there's such a storm of people denying global warming and related phenomenon in the United States. Here's a map of the air temperature anomaly (difference in temperature from expected):

We're not FEELING it here. The anomalies are making all US territory colder, as cold air from Canada and the north pole are pushed into our area. Today it is very cold around my area, particularly, with weather I'd normally associate with states thousands of miles north.
Combine this with our conservative branches believing that economic activity is inherently good, and government intervention inherently bad, and you have people who experience massive cognitive dissonance at the very concept. It contradicts everything they know, so they reject it.
But all "Canadians for global warming" jokes aside, temperature affects more than just temperature. Farming, culture, and engineering are all affected. Adaptation could prove...expensive.